Co-op in Review: August 8, 2013

This week, the co-op kids learned about two huge disasters and one huge accomplishment!  The Grammar level kids studied the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic!  The Great San Francisco Earthquake was a disaster in and of itself, but the fires that it set off throughout the city were even a greater problem.  But as we've learned before in history, people are resilient and the city was soon rebuilt and fully functional.   The kids also read about the sinking of the Titanic.  There are many safety lessons to be learned when we study the Titanic, but the biggest lesson to take away is that only God is sovereign and that promises made by man ("this ship is unsinkable") can fail while God's faithfulness is absolute.  The older kids as well studied the building of the Panama Canal.  What seemed impossible due to mountainous terrain, disease and horrible working conditions became a reality as the Americans completed the waterway connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific.  This week, the Upper Grammar class and the Dialectic class both made models of the Titanic out of wood kits.  They turned out great!  The Lower Grammar class made simple, working seismographs out of shoe boxes.  They had fun seeing if they would really work! And, the Five in a Row class read the book, "How to Make and Apple Pie and See the World."  It's a deliciously silly book that takes readers all over the world gathering ingredients for an apple pie!  The kids then made little apple pies out of fabric.  Yummy!

First Day of Co-op 2013-2014!

Our first day of Co-op for the 2013/2014 school year was on Thursday, August 1, 2013.  We are blessed again this year to be meeting in four classrooms at Arizona Community Church in Tempe.  This year, nine families have come together to form the Tapestry of the Desert Co-op:  the Cervantezes, Fenders, Hodges, Kellers, Lees, Laws, Nails, Roberts and Tammanys.   And, all together, we have 30 fabulous kids!  We are all looking forward to a great year together!!  Before breaking out into classes, we played two great games during Large Group time.  The first was a team relay where the kids had to dress and undress in shirts and hats and jackets while racing each other.  And, the for the second, they had to put historical events of Year 3 in order from earliest to most recent.  Then we broke up into our four classes.  The Dialectic kids studied the life and in particular the conservation legacy of our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt.  Roosevelt was responsible for creating hundreds of areas of land that were set aside to be preserved for future generations to enjoy.  The kids worked together to create a map, made out of M & M's showing Roosevelt's conservation projects.  They then made timelines of Roosevelt's life.  Both the upper and lower grammar kids studied the first flight--made by the inventive and inspiring brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright.  They then made awesome Wright flyers of their own out of styrofoam and toothpicks! The Five in a Row class also learned about a pioneer in flight by reading the book, "The Glorious Flight."  It's the story of Louis Berloit, a Frenchman, who builds an aircraft  and became the first man to cross the English Channel.  He inspires everyone around him to never give up!  The kids then made some aircrafts of their own out of paper.